by Annie Groves
In the far corner stood a coat stand on which Con hung his hat and his camel-coloured cashmere coat – a necessity for anyone in production in the theatre.
It was Con’s habit to tilt back his chair, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his feet on his desk. The tilting chair had other benefits as well, as he was fond of proving to his ‘girls’.
The only changes Con had made to the room were to have the clear glass in the upper half of the door replaced with frosted glass and to have a bolt fitted on the inside.
‘What the hell do you mean, telling some daft girls to come here for some dancing competition?’ Con demanded irritably of his nephew.
‘Only practising what you preach, Uncle Con,’ Kieran replied insouciantly. ‘You was the one wot told me never to turn down an opportunity.’
‘Aye, and I told you to mek sure you keep it off your own doorstep,’ Con reminded him angrily.
Kieran laughed, showing strong white teeth. ‘Nah, that isn’t what I was meaning. I was thinking of you, see, not meself. This young pair – twins they are – were after knowing if you ran any dancing competitions like they do at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool.’
‘Well I don’t,’ Con snapped. ‘I’ve got enough problems with proper dancers without getting myself involved with ruddy amateurs.’
Young though, and twins. He’d always fancied having a matching pair, so to speak, not that he’d ever want to get himself involved with girls too green to know what was what – too much trouble by far, that was. No, he liked them knowing and game, though age, or the lack of it, was no bar to that. He could string ’em along a bit, tell them that he’d do something for them. Con grinned to himself. Well, of course he would be doing, but it wouldn’t exactly be the something they had in mind.
‘Yeah, but the difference is that with professionals you have to pay them, but with amateurs they’re the ones paying you. See what happens is that these girls that are mad for dancing pay to go into these competitions. Of course, you have to give the winners a prize, but I reckon that letting them go on and do a bit of a routine in a matinée show that no one goes to see will do the trick with that. Of course, to make it worthwhile you’d have to advertise the competition – but I reckon that putting a few leaflets up in all the dance halls will do that. I thought if we told this pair that you’ll be doing a competition here, they’ll spread the word for us, as well.’
Con looked at his nephew with grudging admiration. Of course he wouldn’t have looked at doing a ruddy dance competition if Emily had come up with some money, but since it didn’t look like she was going to, there was no harm in him taking a look at these girls. No harm at all. And no need either to say anything to Kieran about his private thoughts.
‘We can’t lose,’ Kieran was telling him. ‘We can charge the dancers to enter and we can charge them that comes and watches them competing as well.’
Without taking his eyes off his nephew Con yelled out, ‘Harriet, if those girls are still here, bring them in.’
‘But, Mummy, Daddy will have to give me a job, otherwise I’ll have to go and work in some dreadful munitions factory,’ Bella protested angrily.
Her mother had arrived at Bella’s house ten minutes earlier, and now they were sitting in Bella’s kitchen, drinking the tea that Bella had grudgingly made.
‘Bella, your father isn’t in a very good mood at the moment, not with the Ministry of Labour being given these new powers over businesses that are engaged in essential war work.’
‘But only last week he was going on about how it would be a good thing because the men wouldn’t be able to go on strike and things.’
‘Well, yes, but that was before he’d realised how much he was going to have to pay them, now that the Government’s going to set a minimum wage for men working in these essential jobs.’
Vi returned her cup to its saucer. The tea set had been one of Bella’s wedding presents, and the delicate flowers on the white china perfectly matched her kitchen décor. Not that Bella was currently in any mood to appreciate that fact.
‘But you’ve got to do something, Mummy.’
‘Well, I don’t know what, Bella. I must say that it’s very difficult, what with so many of the other mothers in my WVS group having daughters who are doing their bit.’
‘I am doing my bit, aren’t I? I’ve got those refugees.’
Crossly Bella got up and made a big play of carrying their empty tea cups over to the sink, and then returning to remove the embroidered cloth from the tea tray, and start to fold it. Normally she left such tasks in the hope that one of her billetees would do it for her.
‘Well, yes, darling, but Mrs Jeffries’ daughter has joined the Wrens, and Mrs Blackston’s the ATS.’
‘You said after Christmas that Daddy had said that people were calling girls who joined the ATS “officers’ groundsheets”, and worse, and that he was relieved that his daughter wasn’t showing him up by joining,’ Bella pointed out crossly, abandoning the tray cloth.
‘Well, yes, but that was before the Government brought out these new laws about young women of your age having to sign up for war work, Bella. You’ll have to find something, you know; otherwise it will look very odd. Daphne’s thinking about becoming a Red Cross trainee, and—’
‘Oh, bully for Daphne.’
‘Really, Bella, I’m ashamed of you for speaking like that. You know we really do have to make sure that we’re a credit to Charles now, with him being on the brink of proposing to Daphne. I don’t like saying this to you, but Daddy does feel that you’ve let him down a bit with your marriage and I have to say that I agree with him.’
‘You wanted me to marry Alan,’ Bella reminded her mother furiously.
Ignoring Bella’s outburst, Vi continued firmly, ‘I’m so thrilled that Charles’s got leave over Easter and that he and Daphne will be coming here. Of course, by then Charles will have some very special news for us. He and Daphne are spending this weekend with her parents and Charles has as good as said that he intends to ask Daphne’s father for his permission for them to be engaged. And that’s another reason why Daddy won’t be very pleased if you start pestering him for a job. Not when he’s already going to have to give Charles the kind of private income that Daphne’s father will expect him to have.’
Bella wanted to scream and stamp her feet, and point out to her mother that no one was taken in by her sudden adoption of such phrases such as ‘private income’, or by referring to Charlie as ‘Charles’.
‘Look, I must run, Bella,’ Vi announced, getting up from the kitchen table, putting on her coat and her gloves, then collecting her handbag. ‘I want to write to Daphne. She’s sent me the sweetest letter. Anyway, haven’t you got a WVS meeting this evening?’
Bella waited until her mother had gone to vent her fury, by kicking one of the chairs across the kitchen and then bursting into angry tears.
It just wasn’t fair. Why did things always seem to go wrong for her? She was the prettiest girl for miles around and yet she had ended up married to a man like Alan, who had been so horrid to her and whose parents had pretended to be so well-to-do when all the time all they had really possessed had been debts. And now, just when she needed her mother to make a fuss of her, Mummy was fussing round Daphne.
How could it be possible for lazy crafty Charlie to end up making such a good marriage whilst she had ended up with someone like Alan? She had been relieved at first when she had been widowed, but that had been before she had realised that people expected her to go into some sort of mourning for her husband and behave more as though she was her mother’s age than not even twenty-one yet. And now the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, was saying that he wanted women like her to do factory work; jobs that men had left behind when they had joined up. Factory work! The very idea! For all that her mother had been unsympathetic, Vi certainly wouldn’t want to tell Daphne’s posh mother that she, Bella, ‘Charles’s’ sister was working in a factory, Bella acknowledged, calming
down slightly. She must point that out to her mother. Then there would be no more talk about her father not being able to give her a job, Bella decided triumphantly.
Jean was worried about the twins. They were up to something, she was sure of it. She had said as much to Grace when she had come home on Sunday with Seb, whilst Seb and Sam, and Luke, who had managed to get a bit of leave, had been busy talking together about the fact that the headquarters for the Western Approaches Command, along with the headquarters of the RAF’s Group 15 Coastal Command had been relocated to a complex of reinforced buildings beneath Derby House. Seb was now a member of one of the teams working within the Western Approaches Command, that work being very confidential and hush-hush, Grace had told her mother conspiratorially.
There was nothing that Jean could quite put her finger on to explain her anxiety; it was more of a mother’s intuition. The twins came home every day full of their work at Lewis’s, where they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves in their normal way, playing tricks on people by changing places, to such good effect that, as they admitted to Jean, they had been threatened with being moved to separate departments.
‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ Jean had scolded them. ‘Grace was so well thought of at Lewis’s and didn’t have a blemish on her record, and look at you two, in trouble before you’ve been there a few weeks.’
‘It was just a bit of fun, Mum, honest,’ Lou had assured her. ‘And even Mrs Cooke, the manageress of our department, said that it was good to see customers smiling when they come in and see two of us and that anything that lifted people’s spirits in wartime was a good thing.’
‘Mm, well, I just hope she doesn’t start thinking that her department is getting too much of a good thing,’ Jean had told them.
She had hoped that going out to work full time would keep them so busy that they’d grow out of wanting to go on the stage, but if anything, they seemed to be spending even more time practising their dancing, racing upstairs the minute they’d had their tea just like they had done tonight, and then not coming down again until suppertime, all evening that gramophone of theirs playing dance music.
Con knew when he was on to a good thing. He hadn’t reckoned much to the twins when he had first seen them – in fact he’d been downright disappointed. There was no way they measured up to his fantasy. They looked so young for their age that they could have passed for fourteen really, with their curls and their freckles, girls really rather than young women, and without any kind of sexual appeal for him. Granted, they were identical, and that could be enough to get a sentimental audience going.
But then they had started to dance and Con had seen their value immediately. The pair of them were naturals, and bright as well. That mirror imagine routine they’d done had been pretty smart. Not that Con had said that to them. Instead he’d frowned and shaken his head and told them to come back in a couple of weeks when he’d had a word in a few ears and seen if anyone was interested in having a dancing competition. In the meantime he’d told them they were to keep quiet. And he reckoned they would. He’d asked them their names before they’d left and Con, an expert on such matters after all, had known from the look they exchanged and the way they had hesitated that they’d been lying when they’d given him the names of Kitty and Lucy Carlton.
But he’d slapped Kieran on the back as they stood together at the bar of the shabby pub not far from the theatre that Con favoured, and ordered him a second drink.
The last thing she had felt like doing tonight was going to a boring WVS meeting in the church hall, Bella thought crossly, but at least it was better than staying at home having to listen to the Poles going on and on about their recent visit to see Jan, who was based with a squadron of Polish fighter pilots.
All she’d heard from the moment they’d come back had been how heroic Jan was, and how happy they were to have been reunited with some friends from Poland, who had moved down to the base to be near their own son.
In Bella’s opinion it was a pity that Bettina and her mother didn’t take themselves off and move in with their friends, or at least it would have been if that didn’t mean that Bella would be obliged to take in other billetees to occupy her spare bedrooms.
‘Hello, you don’t mind if I join you and introduce myself, do you? Only our chairwoman mentioned at the last meeting that she thought that we’d get on well together.’
The latecomer’s whisper had Bella looking up at her in astonishment as she sat down on the chair next to Bella’s own.
The church hall was an imposing rectangular building halfway between the church and the church school, which had gone from rarely being used to almost full-time occupation with the war and the need for so many different organisations needing somewhere to meet to discuss their war work and responsibilities.
Since the vicar’s wife was on the WVS committee she had first call on the church hall, access to the chairs, which were kept locked in a separate storeroom to prevent pilfering and, even more importantly, a key to the kitchen.
The WVS meeting had only just started, the room in semidarkness thanks to the blackout curtains and the low-wattage light bulbs dangling on flexes from the ceiling. The committee, which included Vi, were seated on chairs in front of a long trestle table at the far end of the room – close to the stove, which was supposed to heat the whole room but in fact heated only a few feet.
The chairwoman was reading out something dull and boring about the previous meeting, and the importance of knitting more squares for blankets, leaving Bella free to study the newcomer, who in return gave Bella a confident smile.
‘I’d have introduced myself at the last meeting,’ she whispered, ‘but you’d left before I could. I’m Laura Wright. I’m a teacher.’
A teacher. Well, that probably explained her confident manner, Bella decided, but Laura Wright was much younger and much prettier than any teacher Bella could remember from her own schooldays – but, happily, not as pretty as Bella herself.
‘I’m hoping that I can interest you in a project I’m involved with.’
Bella waited warily.
‘I’ve been asked to organise an emergency crèche service for the area, to take in any little ones whose homes have been bombed, or whose mothers can’t look after them all day for any reason – you know, if they have to go out to work. Mind you, from what I’ve heard a lot of the manufacturing companies will be setting up their own nurseries now that Mr Bevin has said that he intends to make it obligatory for young women of twenty and twenty-one to register for war work. And the thing is that I’m going to need some help. I’ve mentioned this to our chairwoman and she suggested that I should approach you. Would you be interested, do you think? It would be full-time work with pay. Of course, I’d have to get official approval but our chairwoman didn’t seem to think that would be much of a problem. She mentioned that your father is on the local council.’
‘I’ve never looked after small children,’ Bella protested, somewhat taken aback by Laura Wright’s confident open manner. Bella didn’t have any close girl friends and she didn’t really know how to go on with members of her own sex who were her own age, especially not in this kind of situation. And then there was that sharp pang of unwanted emotion she had just felt at the mention of young children, and the angry fear that went with it. Bella didn’t like it when something made her feel vulnerable or made her think about things she didn’t want to think about. Why should the thought of young children and babies upset her? It didn’t, and she wasn’t going to let it, either.
‘I should have thought you’d need trained nursery nurses,’ she told Laura Wright dismissively, eyeing the woman seated on the other side of her, with her neatly stacked squares of knitting on her knee waiting to be handed in. How utterly boring to spend one’s spare time knitting blanket squares. The very thought made Bella shudder. She was beginning to wish now that she had thought of some kind of more exciting war work to get involved with, although quite what she didn’t know.
‘Oh, yes, we will,’ Laura Wright agreed, ‘but I will also need someone to work as my assistant, help with all the paperwork, admitting the babies, keeping a register, all those practical things, as well as dealing with council officials and the like. Our chairwoman said that she thought you would be the ideal person. I must say that you do look the kind to me who knows how to get what she wants.’
Perhaps because of Laura Wright’s compliment, or maybe because of the thought of having to knit blanket squares, Bella didn’t know, but for some reason, instead of bristling or dismissing Laura’s words outright, Bella discovered that she actually felt intrigued and even a little bit excited by the other girl’s suggestion.
‘Look, you don’t have to make up your mind right now,’ Laura told her. ‘We’ll be having the crèche in a spare classroom at the junior school. That way it will be easy for the mothers to leave both their little ones and their older children, if they have any, so you can always come and see me there and let me know if you want the job, although I need to know by the end of the week. Luckily they’ve got a kitchen at the school, and the council will provide us with all the things we need – you know, cots and bedding and the like. It would be something very worthwhile.’
Had Laura Wright offered her a job, especially one described as ‘very worthwhile’ at any other time, Bella knew she would probably have turned it down flat, but Mr Bevin’s plans to oblige women to do war work, combined with her mother’s warning that Bella’s own father was not likely to be willing to offer her a job, combined to make Laura Wright’s suggestion seem both appealing and providential.
Bella decided that she would enjoy telling her mother not to bother coaxing her father on her behalf, because she had found a job for herself. The Assistant to the Manageress in charge of a crèche. Assistant Crèche Manageress – let Daphne try to better that!